Aerian

2001, Allen S. Weiss, translating an extract from page 113 of the 1979 Union Générale d’Éditions republication of Marcel Schwob’s “La Machine à Parler” (a short story which first appeared in his 1892 collection Le Roi au Masque d’Or), for “Narcissistic Machines and Erotic Prostheses”, essay 2 (occupying pages 51–74) of Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (2003, Amsterdam University Press, →ISBN, edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey; the quotation is from page 68 of Camera Obscura The voice, which is the aerian sign of thought, whence of the soul, which instructs, preaches, exhorts, prays, praises, loves, through which the entire being is manifested in life, nearly palpable by the blind, impossible to describe because it is too undulating and diverse, in fact too alive and incarnate in too many sonorous forms, the voice that Théophile Gautier gave up trying to put into words because it is neither soft, nor dry, nor hot, nor cold, nor colorless, nor colorful, but has something of all that in another domain, that voice that one cannot touch, that one cannot see, that most immaterial of terrestrial things, that which most resembles a spirit, is stolen on the fly by science with a stylet and buried in small holes on a turning cylinder.

Figure to yourself an extensive suite of rooms, long galleries and passages, the ceilings, or rather the beams, in such aërian perspective, as nearly to evade the sight; the walls literally bare and green, from damp; the pavement more rugged than Berkeley-Square, and I believe has not been cleaned for many years.

"We provoke cough," says Schwilgué, "to favour the expulsion of foreign bodies introduced from without into the aërian tube, and especially of liquids; we have recourse to it to favour the expectoration of mucus, of membraniform concretions, and of pus, which have accumulated in the aërian passages, whenever the local irritation is sufficiently great."

Wounds which, whatever their seat, are complicated with aerian or bacterial emphysema, and the gases from which are infiltrated to the scrotum.